NYPD Sending Their Best Cops To Twitter School To Learn All About Common Sense

[Mike]

I'd say it's been pretty well established at this point that the NYPD sucks at Twitter. Occasionally they get it right and engage with the public in a meaningful way, but too often NYPD officers put things on Twitter that can only serve to cause the public to question their judgement. Insensitivity, racism, and otherwise crass behavior doesn't make the NYPD look all that good, of course, so the top brass has a solution. They're going to review their hiring practices to make sure they're hiring good, level-headed men and women to put on the uniform and protect the public. Hahahahaha, just kidding, they've decided to send some of their officers to "Twitter school" instead.

After a series of online gaffes — including a joke tweet about a dead woman and a hashtag that became a laughingstock — the NYPD is forcing top officers to take a course in Twitter. “USE COMMON SENSE” reads a memo handed out to the commanders at the first training session at John Jay College.

Yes, police are going to a formal class in order to learn how to use Twitter in a manner consistent with common sense. That appears to indicate that common sense isn't all that common amongst NYPD officers, which should probably be setting off alarm bells in everyone's brain. The kind of person that doesn't know they shouldn't make fun of dead members of the public they're supposed to be protecting and serving probably aren't the kind of people I really want walking around with a gun in the first place.

The course is designed to prevent embarrassments like a tweet sent by Capt. Thomas Harnisch of Harlem last month in which he made light of the death of a woman who fell onto the subway tracks at Union Square while using an iPad.

“Let me guess, driver’s fault right?” he wrote over his personal account in a tweet directed at a safe-streets advocacy group.

Lovely. It's not that a single incident like this was particularly egregious, or that it prevents Harnisch from doing his job. The problem is that when the inability to act appropriately is such a pandemic across the police force that formal training on not acting like a jackass is warranted, the public might better be served by excising said jackasses from the police ranks entirely.

Originally Published: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 03:42:08 GMT
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[stormium]

i think it would save a lot of time and resources if they raised the bar on the qualifications for becoming a police officer and started requiring high school diplomas... or at least one year's worth of experience as a forum moderator.

jus' sayin'...